We don’t believe in amnesties, cooed Yvette, announcing what sounded just like an amnesty...
PLEASE don’t call it an amnesty. ‘The Labour Party doesn’t believe in amnesties,’ cooed Yvette Cooper as she announced something that sounded uncommonly like, er, an amnesty.
Life is certainly to be made more congenial for scores of thousands of asylum seekers. The new Home Secretary said this should be thought of as ‘processing’.
A useful verb. Dreadful things happen to lumps of pig and cow when they are turned into frankfurters. The entire grisly technique, with its grinding of bone, powdering of hoof, nostril-mincing and sausage skins made of intestines, is called ‘processing’.
To avert a hoo-hah about loads of migrants being allowed to work in Britain, Ms Cooper prefaced her brief announcement – the tricky nub of it lasted a minute and was hard to understand – with a long, theatrical preamble about what a disaster the Tories had left. She was ‘shocked’, ‘shocked’ and for a third time ‘shocked’ by what she had found on entering the Home Office.
Each time she described her shock, she held tight to the despatch box, swayed a bit and dropped her voice, as if confronted by another rodent under the floorboards. Behind her, a new MP, Jade Botterill (Lab, Ossett and Denby Dale), a right little attention-seeker, pulled faces of sympathetic concern.
The wicked Conservatives had been planning to spend £10billion on the Rwanda policy, claimed Ms Cooper, and they had already blown £700million. ‘Made-up numbers,’ harrumphed her shadow James Cleverly.
Yvette was so ‘shocked’ by all this Tory waste, it was a surprise Jade Botterill did not lean forward with a small bottle of sal volatile to rouse Yvette from an Edwardian faint.
THE melodramatics would have worked better had the stodgily inexpressive Angela Eagle not been sitting beside Ms Cooper. Impossibly glam ‘Ange’ (okay, I exaggerate a little about her foxy sheen) is the immigration minister. She was all in black, like a Smersh assassin, not twitching an inch throughout the session. Rosa Klebb’s bodyguard.
Yvette herself has been quite transformed by high office. When not trying to sound ‘shocked’, she was positively skittish. The hairdo has been remoulded a little and given a silvery-sandy rinse, but it was more than that. Yes, she wobbled her chin, but she has always done that. Yes, she still did that sing-song thing with her voice and spoke to MPs as if addressing a class of dim adolescents. But she also laughed. Yvette Cooper laughed!
It was a gurgling, yodelling sort of noise, such as you get when letting your shaving water go down the plughole.
It came when she was teasing Mr Cleverly about his ambitions to lead what is left of the Conservative Party. Family members have no doubt heard the laugh before – now we know the sound she makes when Ed Balls does his Charles Atlas impressions before bed – but in Parliament, in all these years, I don’t think I ever heard Yvette laugh. The dam has been breached. She’s not yet ‘Cackling Kamala Harris’ but the cork is out.
Before the Cooper statement, Sir Keir Starmer told MPs about the two recent summits he attended. Liam Byrne (Hodge Hill and Solihull North) was the first of several Labour MPs to coat the Prime Minister with treacle. Mr Byrne averred that Sir Keir had ‘made a flying start on the world stage’. We must brace ourselves for more of this sort of thing in coming months.
Carolyn Harris (Lab, Neath and Swansea East) found a jollier way of being noticed: she wore a large kaftan in Day-Glo green. It set off her mauve fringe perfectly. Parliament TV viewers, do not adjust your sets.
Sir Keir was up for an hour. It felt longer. At one point he referred to Rishi Sunak as the Prime Minister. ‘Old habits die hard,’ he chortled. Rishi looked sad and somehow even smaller. Yet he is being such a gallant brick about his terrible downfall. Everyone’s favourite loser since the Jamaican bobsleigh team.